On the first day of grad school for her PhD, a fellow student tells Bianca Jones Marlin that she doesn't really belong there.
Bianca Jones Marlin is a neuroscientist and doctoral candidate at New York University, School of Medicine. She received dual bachelor degrees in biology and adolescent education from St. John's University. Her time as a high school biology teacher led her to the laboratory, where she now studies the neurochemicals that govern communication and dictate social memories. Bianca investigates how the brain changes in the presence of the "love hormone," oxytocin. Her research aims to understand the vital bond between mother and child, and uses oxytocin as a treatment in strengthening fragile and broken parental relationships. Bianca, a native New Yorker, lives in Manhattan with her scientist husband, Joe, and their cat Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who is named after the famed neuroanatomist.
This story originally aired on March 26, 2015.
STORY TRANSCRIPT
I graduated with a dual bachelor's degree in biology and adolescent education. I was on a full academic scholarship and, when I graduated, I got the Distinguished Student Leader award for my service as the president of the student government. In between that time, I did research at MIT and Harvard and I presented that work at Yale and at Vanderbilt University. Let's see what else. I play the clarinet.
When I started applying to graduate schools, I sent my application to a few schools. I was asked for interviews at that Ivy Leagues and there were financial incentives from schools on the West Coast. I chose to start my PhD at New York University School of Medicine studying neurobiology and physiology.
I remember the first day of graduate school. We all came in, all the first years, just as equally proud I think as I was and excited to finally be here. After the applications, after the summers and late hours and after being pre‑med, we're finally here, until we're here for six years. We're still finally here.
We gathered around the bar and we started chatting, just as colleagues, learning about the other individuals, figuring out where they came from, what their story was. So we're surrounded by the bar and I'm there, just as equally excited to hear about my new friends, see who you're going to date, who you're going to be friends with, just doing that whole circle. I married one of them.
As we're talking and it came to my turn to talk about my past and how I got here at NYU, a student interjected and he said, “I mean it's obvious why Bianca's here at NYU. It's because she's black.”
Here we go. Okay. So what do I say next, because this is a slightly awkward situation? If my mind was quick, I had seven or eight things, but as I walked out, “I wish I would have said this. I should have said that.”
But what I did say is something along the lines of, “Private universities don't have affirmative action.” I have no clue if that's true, by the way. Just, it's the first thing that came to my mind and I moonwalked out of that conversation before my face started to sting and before I looked a little bit too frazzled.
On my way out, as I walked out past the bar and past the door, I took a survey of the room. There were six generations of graduate students, six. And I was one of two black people in the room. That quota was about to be cut in half because I was going home.
So, just looking at that, observing that, I started to think, “After all the things I've done, maybe in this situation, they become null and void. Maybe I am just filling a quota, because there's obviously a lack.”
My love for science doesn't really have a birthday. As far as what my family tells me, I was always like that dirty kid. My bifocals are squished up against the tree trunk trying to see what's going on inside. I was always picking up stones, collecting the bugs from underneath the stones.
My mom's here. That's her laughing, because she knows it's true. Digging for toads and snakes in her garden and I'd bring them back to my laboratory. My laboratory was my bedroom, yeah, to my mom's chagrin.
My brother did show choir, my sisters studied art and they were in beauty pageants. I, however, I volunteered to swab the marching band floor for fungal spores in both the brass section and the woodwind section to see if fungal spores were accumulating in the spit when the spit dripped out. If it's nature versus nurture, my genes were straight on the road for nerd‑dom.
My nature definitely did play a role as well and that's for my love of neurobiology. I grew up one of roughly, let's give or take, 50 children. My parents, two of the most noblest people you'll ever meet, if you ever do get to meet them, are foster parents. They're my biological parents but I have many foster brothers and sisters.
I think my definition of sibling was different from the world's definition of sibling at the time, because my definition of sibling was anyone who calls my mom and dad ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ are my sibling.
So when my brother would go out and introduce me to his friends and he'd say, “Oh, this is my sister Bianca.” They'd look at me and then they'd look at him. They'd look at his blonde hair, blue eyes, and look back at me. And they'd wait for us to say we're kidding, but we weren't.
One of my sisters, there was one time where we said we were going to go to Burger King. We were going to collect $3 and change. There's a lot of kids in the house. There's a lot of change running around. We were able to collect $3, get on our bike, and we were going to go to Burger King and treat ourselves to a nice treat.
So we get on the bike, and on the way there, immediately, we're stopped by this beautiful new opening. “Grand opening,” the banner said. "Pet Shop." So instead of going to Burger King, we diverted in there, into the pet shop and walked out with a pet mouse, and still enough change to get French fries.
So we snuck back in. We MacGyvered our way back into the bedroom, because with seven kids at one time in the house, it's really easy to get in and out undetected. And we put the mouse underneath our bed in a shoebox.
The next morning, we woke up, opened up the cage, and we realized that the mouse had a family that was just as big as ours. The week went by, and we were able to maintain this small colony.
Towards the end of the week, when we went back to check out the mouse, we saw that the mom was missing. It could have been the fact that we couldn't find the mouse. It may have chewed through, or a series of other things. But this caused something to break in my sister's behavior. Through a series of loud noises and stuff, by the time my mom came in, she was able to pull her off of me, but I took the hits. I took the hits because I knew the hits that she took.
I mean, my siblings, both foster siblings and biological siblings get it, because I grew up in Long Island. So, throughout the day, the Long Island Suburban Paradise is lovely. We went to Splish Splash on the weekends. We had a trampoline. We had a pool. We lived life to the fullest. We would spend nights outside on the trampoline and say we're going to build a tent and we're going to stay out here. Then we would look up at the stars and it was beautiful, until you started to see that thing circling. That thing was a bat and then you went back inside, and you decided you're not brave enough to spend the night outside.
But at night, when I would hang over my bunk bed and speak to my siblings, I would hear the other stories. I would hear the stories of their life before they came into our home. I would hear the stories that strip them of self‑respect, that strip them of a future, and that crush their souls based on someone else's actions.
A few of my colleagues now in lab, we joke that my mom induces cortical plasticity, because my mom took people who potentially would have been broken. And through love and through motivation and through respect, made them into individuals who could go out and do the same for other people.
I study right now the neuromodulator oxytocin. It's known as love hormone in caregivers. So, mothers who don't treat their pups well, I've added oxytocin to their brain and I've seen two things. It changes the brain's signature from a bad mom to that of a good mom. It also changes the behavior, so the animal starts to care for her pups better.
I know that my foster siblings brought me to neuroscience in two ways. Yes, I study social care and, yes, I study maternal behavior, and I'm assuming that based on the security nature of my life that that's probably why I got here, but they've also taught me another thing. They taught me that I can surround myself with positivity and I can surround myself with people who believe in me, and I can surround myself with scientists who respect my scientific prowess and cannot help but to put their biases aside based on the data that I collect.
So, now, I'm a sixth year in the program. I defend my thesis in two‑and‑a‑half weeks. Thank you. And after a series of happy hours and classes and papers accepted, papers not accepted, passed tests and not‑so‑passed tests, my group, my cohort from six years ago, we met up for drinks, actually to welcome the new first years in. And that same student, who is now my colleague and I would call her friend, came.
We started chatting about what he's doing next in life and he started sharing with me some of his insecurities. He went to a state school. His mom was a single mom, couldn't afford to send him to a more expensive school. Now that he's going out on the job market, he's a little bit nervous about the fact that his resume doesn't read as well as others.
It was in this situation that I was able to share my feelings with him. I was able to say, “You know, I actually have my own insecurities as well.” Insecurities that he didn't even know, probably, that he had catalyzed, that sometimes I feel like I'm thrown into a whole different family.
And I sit with that paranoia that if I'm presenting my data, the first thought that's coming out is, well, I'm giving you a free pass and you're here because you're black, not because you deserved it.
And just as much as the words that he spoke to me six years ago changed the way I approached graduate school, the words that he spoke to me then and there also did.
And what he said to me is, "Bianca, come on. Everyone knows you're smart and you deserve to be here."
Thank you.